Posted
by
timothyon Sunday March 10, 2013 @09:24AM
from the he's-jes'-this-guy-y'know? dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, took the keynote stage at this year's SXSW to talk about everything from space exploration to electric cars. Joining him onstage to ask questions was Chris Anderson, the former Wired editor and co-founder of 3DRobotics. Musk used his keynote discussion to show off a video of a rocket test, which he said had taken place earlier that week. In the video, a ten-story rocket takes off from a launching pad and hovers several hundred feet in the air before landing in the same spot, upright. It's an early test of SpaceX's reusable-rocket project. 'Reusability is extremely important,' Musk told the audience. 'If you think it's important that humanity extends beyond Earth and becomes a multitenant species' then reusable rockets will prove essential. Musk also talked about the recent controversy involving his Tesla Motors, which started when a New York Times reporter claimed in a much-circulated column that his electric-powered Model S sedan had ground to a halt during a test drive up the East Coast. 'I have no problem with negative feedback,' he told Anderson, in response to the latter's question. 'There have been hundreds of negative articles, and yet I've only spoken out a few times. I don't have a problem with critical reviews, I have a problem with false reviews.'"

I think the biggest reason he gets so much flak is because no one can figure out how to make a quick buck off his businesses.

The traders have been making money off of the "flak" Elon has been getting.

Investors in Tesla are quite patient in regards to the life cycle of a business such as Tesla. They knew full well the history of electric cars, the hurdles they will have to overcome, the hurdles that Tesla will have to overcome, and public perception of electric cars.

Some investors have a long term hope of Tesla being a big car maker and others think that eventually, a big car maker (Toyota, GM, Ford, Mercedes, etc...) will purc

Considering that DeLorean Motors [delorean.com] is still in business and they are even looking at restarting production, it is an interesting comparison to make. Admittedly that the company is certainly no longer under original ownership of any kind and that being a shareholder of the original company was likely a bad idea, the company still seems to have some amazing life and seems to be a company that can't quite die even if it is a Zombie of sorts.

The better comparison that has been often used for Tesla has been the T [wikipedia.org]

I think it is because the entrenched "Complexes" (American Auto Manuf & NASA sub contractors) have no interest in moving the industries forward they just want to keep feeding at the trough. Along comes this guy with the crazy idea of engineering a better machine. In doing so he shows the world that what they were told cannot be done can be. The entrenched complexes then panic as their trough might be taken away and that is where all the hate is coming from.

The Tucker fell apart at it's unvieling, breaking to control arms under it's own weight. It was louder than any other car of the time, and had no reverse gear. Did "the man" force him to try to sell a terrible design, or is it possible that he simply wasn't up to the task?

That was the prototype. Production cars had none of those problems. What "the man" did was get the SEC to pursue him with a pack of lies. Tucker was acquitted on every single charge without calling a single witness for the defense. He was acquitted based on the prosecution's testimony! One of the prosecution's witnesses stated that he was still driving one of the Tucker 48s and that it had over 30,000 miles on it and still handled smoothly at 90 miles per hour. The SEC charges were baseless and were b

The fundamental claim that Musk put out -- that the reporter intentionally drained the battery, and that the towing was faked -- has been completely disproven. The reporter used the car in non-optimal user behavior, and the car failed. This is entirely legitimate reviewing, and Musk called him a liar. '

Broder deliberately charged it less than he needed. When he left the last charging station the car very clearly stated that it would not be able to reach the destination. This is not "non-optimal user behavior", but a complete driver failure, except that it almost certainly was intentional to make a "good" story. An ICE car would behave in the exact same way. This is not specific to EVs.

An EV generally gives a lot more warnings before it runs out of charge than an ICE car does before it runs out of gas. You are no more at risk of being stranded with an EV than with an ICE car and probably less. If he wanted to make a legitimate case against EVs he should criticize the charging times instead.

You are no more at risk of being stranded with an EV than with an ICE car and probably less.

That is completely untrue. With an ICE, a handheld tank of fuel can be carried to any 'stranded' vehicle and it can be refueled and the vehicle can immediately proceed on it's way. There is no equivalent (yet) of a mobile recharging device that can be transported to an EV. This fact was shown by the reporter's experience. If anything, the reporter demonstrated that the typical impatient traveler, who might jet o

Or an hour and a half later, when AAA gets there. At which point you could be towed to a charging station instead, anyway, and then get a quick cjarge.

I don't think you have the same definition of "quick" that the rest of us have. It takes an hour to fully charge from drained and that is at a rapid charging station. Get it down to 5 minutes and then you can call it quick. Not to mention that you now have to have a tow truck and be towed to a charging station. I'm all in favour of electric cars but until they improve the recharge speed I can only imagine using them for a "runabout town" sort of car where the distance is not too far and they can recharge o

I talk about the risk of being stranded, not how to solve the problem when it happens. Even then, there are more possibilities than you are aware of. Look at this: http://news.aaa-calif.com/pr/aaa/PRN-first-electric-vehicle-charging-232337.aspx [aaa-calif.com] My point is that it is a lot harder to experience an unexpected stop in an EV than in a gas car since the EV tracks the remaining range more accurately and gives out a lot of warnings. Electricity is also more widely available than gas. Electric outlets are everywhere, gas pumps aren't. Even if you drive it until you hit "turtle mode" (or whatever it is called in a Tesla, I have a Leaf), you would most places be within range of an outlet.

Broder knew very well that he would not reach his destination and he left anyway just to make a "better" story. If he wanted to make a case against EVs he could have focused on having to stay 10 mins longer than he wanted at the last Supercharger. Or he he could have insisted of driving somewhere where there are no Superchargers. These are the real drawbacks of an EV today.

My family has driven a Leaf as our only car for the past year and we know very well how it behaves. We have never feared being stranded anywhere or having the car unexpectedly stop. However we do have to spend more time charging on longer trips than we would have wanted ideally.

With an ICE, a handheld tank of fuel can be carried to any 'stranded' vehicle and it can be refueled and the vehicle can immediately proceed on it's way

In theory, yes, but in practice virtually nobody does that, particularly not stupid people who think they can go twice as far as their gas gauge says they can.. That's why towing companies offer to deliver a gallon or two of gas for $60 and up.

The reporter charged the car up to the point where it said it had a 32 mile range, then left knowing that it was 61 miles until the next charging station. That is not a flaw in the car, it's a reporter intentionally running the battery down so that he can report how

The thing is that if the reporter had waited a few more minutes at the supercharger there would not have been any problems. After he ran into range issues after the first time not charging long enough at a super charger you would think he would have learned, but he didn't. He intentionally undercharged again. If I'm in an unfamiliar vehicle, especially an electric vehicle, I make damned sure I have enough gas or charge before heading out.

The funny thing is that the weekend after that incident a bunch of Tes

BTW, Broder is the NYT token conservative columnest who has said a number of not so complimentary things about EV cars in the past, plus he used to report on the oil industry and doesn't have much experience with cars.

This is a weird thing, that conservatives seem to be against electric cars and in fact efficiency in general.

The thing is, outside of pundits and car drivers, and people who sell fuel, everyone (no matter how conservative) loves efficiency. Truckers love it, because fuel is expensive. Aeropla

When he left the last charging station the car very clearly stated that it would not be able to reach the destination.

... because Tesla support told him, via phone, that the range indicator was unreliable below freezing, and that "range" would return as the battery warmed. They were right - the range improved - but not enough to get to the charger. You'll still filtering the story down to support the PR version of events.

The logs don't lie. The logs of that trip have been published. As the Wannabe King has already posted, Broder deliberately undercharged the car, repeatedly. The logs indicate that he intentionally sabotaged the test, so that the car would fail the tests. Broder used the test to "prove" that the car doesn't work as advertised. Broder had an agenda, and dishonestly used the car to promote his agenda.

As I recall, my telephone had an instruction manual, that suggested that I charge it for an hour before initial use. Had I only charged it for thirty minutes, then complained that it doesn't hold a charge very long, would that be honest? Hell no, it wouldn't. If subsequent charges were only permitted to half-charge the batteries, would I have a legitimate complaint that my phone doesn't hold a charge? Again, hell no.

Read the logs.

In a gasoline powered car, you can't put ten gallons into a sixteen gallon tank of a car that gets 12 mpg, then expect to drive it 180 miles. It just doesn't work that way. You WILL run out of gas!

The logs don't lie. The logs of that trip have been published. As the Wannabe King has already posted, Broder deliberately undercharged the car, repeatedly. The logs indicate that he intentionally sabotaged the test, so that the car would fail the tests.

Charging a Lithium-ion battery isn't like filling a gas tank. It doesn't happen linearly, especially if you're doing a high-amperage quick-charge (which is what the Supercharge is). It starts off charging quickly, but when you get to a certain point clos

The crucial point here is that the car itself told Broder it had only half the needed range to get to the next station (32mi range to travel 61 miles), yet he ceased charging and drove off anyway. This is after nearly running out (again due to undercharging) on the previous leg, so I can't imagine why he felt the car would make it when the stated range was even lower.

That said, the graphs Musk published clearly show the car was over-reporting its expected range by around 20%. If Broder was on the ball, logg

The logs were never released. Seriously, where's the download? Instead, a summary chart was released. They have not, meanwhile, released any recordings of Broders several calls to Telsa support to discuss the fluctuating range indicator. Tesla makes nice cars, but they are not being transparent.

That is hilarious. NYT may or may not be more credible than some other news sources. Broder may or may not be more credible than some other reporters. Apparently, you don't judge issues, you don't judge stories - you just believe a story based on who wrote it, and who published it. Do you think about the stories, or would that strain your brain?

Voting? I don't vote party lines, for Dummiecrats, for Repugnacions, or for Tea Partiers. I vote individual candidates and issues, thank you very much.

Years ago laptop manufacturers often called reviewers liars because the reviewers ran the laptops under real world conditions and achieved battery liars that were fractions of the stated battery life.Those manufacturers that overstated the most were the most vocal.

In cars energy consumption is traditionally widely overstated, as can be seen with the recent manufacturers that had to cut estimates. Some are accurace. The Subaru, in my experience, does can go 60 to 70 miles on a scant two gallons. One of

The problem is, and I got out of the NYT report was saying, is that when charging takes a relatively long tim, and when station are not everywhere, it is easy to get stuck. Not because the car is bad, but because no one is going to drive under ideal conditions, and the temptation to go when the estimates say you can will be great. More work needs to go into energy management.

You are describing precisely the journalist's misrepresentations & why Musk reacted so violently against the article. Undercharging the vehicle, lying about it & then claiming that it is an inherent weakness as the reporter did makes people like you believe that EVs are not reliable. When used according to the indications the vehicle gives & recharging as the Tesla techs indicated, others have performed similar journeys without any issues.

Even cars based on petrol will NOT reach their maximum range if you drive it in a nonoptimal way, why would you expect an electric one to be any different?

The difference is this:

Petrol car doesn't make its maximum range: as soon as it starts getting below about 5% full, spend 5 minutes refuelling at any filling station. If the station is busy, spend an extra 10 minutes queueing. If you get caught short (which is stupid because of the convenience of refuelling) then call out the rescue service with a can of petrol and you're back on the road in an hour or two.

Electric car doesn't make its maximum range: as soon as the gauge drops below 40% or so, start wo

If you have a 2nd car:+ upkeep: depends on how much you do, what shape it is in. easily over $100 per year average+ having to use it often so it doesn't stagnate: an inconvenience+ additional insurance costs: minimal insurance about $500 per year, more if you cover the car's value+ storage space: an inconvenience+ initial cost of a 2nd car: $500-15,000+ additional theft or vandalism risk+ sell it before its a lemon: an inconvenience or an art form...

That's one reason why a luxury car like the Tesla doesn't make that much sense, other than for someone who has the space, money and inclination to run two expensive cars.

However, even with a "short range" car you want one with enough, predictable range that you can use it without worrying about charge all the time. 50 miles sounds fine for commuter use, but not if its likely to plummet to plummet in sub-optimal conditions.

I recently got a Tesla model S. The added insurance cost to keep my old Prius is $100/year. I'm holding on to it for now for hauling my dog around, camping and other trips where my Tesla would be inconvenient. It remains to be seen if I will keep my Prius since I've only had the Tesla for a couple of weeks. Maintenance should be low on my Prius as long as I drive it once in a while, though I may need to look into a gas preservative. I already invested in a battery minder for it since the Prius will run down

I drive an artic (englishese for semi), so I don't have to rent those few times I have to move house because I hate renting. Sure it's hard to find a parking space in London. But it was really handy last year when I had to move. Actually it wasn't that handy, since I had a small flat and all the stuff was rattling around inside because there was so much space. But next time, I'm sure it will be.

Try tracking your costs for a year. It is not difficult to do, just be honest about it. See if at the end your total cost is worth it just because you hate renting. Include those extra fees for London.

I am surprised at what mass transit costs are in London; how do they get them so high? Doesn't anything ever get payed off?? Or did they privatize it so the price never could go down? You have mass transit; mine is shit (midwest USA.) I wonder just how much slower it is than driving with all the traffic cong

Ok, You sound very angry and I don't know why, but let's break down your points:

1. 550 miles over 2 days. If the NYT journalist had charged properly and as instructed, then it would have been 3 charges, but even with 4 charges, eating for 1-2 hours over a 2 day period isn't "not good" it's normal. If I stop at a charging point, plug in and go to a cafe for lunch, it's going to take 45mins to over and hour to complete lunch. I don't think Tesla were suggesting you eat solidly for 2 hours without a pause.

2. The temperature is irrelevant. The NYT journalist claimed he turn the heat down to extend range, the logs show he increased the temperature from 72F to 74F. The actual temperatures don't matter, it's the lie that matters.

3. Same with speed. The journalist claimed he had cruise control on at 55, logs show him travelling at 62-81MPH. Again, it's the lie that matters no the actual speeds.

4. It's well know batteries perform worse in low temperatures, if the journalist had used common sense and charged his battery sufficiently then there wouldn't have been an issue. Most cars, no matter the power source, get 10-20% less than the claimed economy figures. Is this right, no, but to single out one company seems to smack of double standards.

Admittedly I don't follow news columns that closely, but I'm not sure where he's ever appeared to want to be considered a god, and I have no idea what the Segway has to do with Elon Musk or the Tesla.

You should read the actual NYT review and not Musks disingenous claims. The truck driver has confirmed the brakes were locks and charging from his charge would not free them. Musk's claims stem from his logs, and a rather fluffy misinterpretation of them.

"The temperature is irrelevant. The NYT journalist claimed he turn the heat down to extend range, the logs show he increased the temperature from 72F to 74F.

Broder didn't charge the car to full, charged it less at each charging opportunity, and didn't bother plugging in overnight, cold night or not. Then he hit the road when the car told him he would not make it.

No one that owns a smartphone can say what he did wasn't moronic or malicious.

Disclaimer: I don't really know who's telling the truth here. Some of the NY Times article author's claims sound dubious, but I also spotted some problems with Musk's interpretation of the logs.

1. 550 miles over 2 days. If the NYT journalist had charged properly and as instructed, then it would have been 3 charges, but even with 4 charges, eating for 1-2 hours over a 2 day period isn't "not good" it's normal. If I stop at a charging point, plug in and go to a cafe for lunch, it's going to take 45mins to ov

Add up to two hours, most likely less. At an average speed of 64 mph the range should be about 275 miles. Two 45 mins charges at a Supercharger should add enough range, provided there are Superchargers available. Three charges of 30 mins would be better though as the charging power falls with higher charge levels. Add an extra 30 mins somewhere if you want higher margins. You could (and should!) spend some of this time eating anyway which you do while the car charges. Charging is not like filling up a gas c

You have some valid points but it's more a matter of changing your perceptions than a problem with the car.
Your first point about charging 4 times to cover 550 miles is valid. However you'd only have to charge more than once while on your trip for a total of about 30 minutes if there was something strange going on. Maybe you ought to mention why you feel the need to charge 4 times?
Why do you think 72F is too warm? You realize the cars are made to work in Southern California where he lives and where the temperatures routinely are over 100F. So what made you think 72F is too warm for the car?
I share your driving speed preferences and perhaps like to drive a bit faster than you. The Tesla car gives amazing neck straining torqued out acceleration at any speed up to about 130mph. Because of it's low center of gravity due to the battery packs people end up looking for curves to take because it feels so good. So when you say 62 to 81mph is too fast I can only assume you left out a qualifier. Perhaps what you meant to say was too fast for optimal efficiency. Despite the Tesla being the best aerodynamic car on the market and second best in the history of cars you still must take into account how aerodynamic drag increasing exponentially as the speed goes up. Take a BMW out and drive it at 55 and then drive it at 155. You'll notice you get about 1/3rd the mileage or even less at 155. It's physics.
As for needing to charge your car in a European winter every 50 to 100 miles. Sure. If you say parked it outside and only drove a mile to 3 miles per day you might have to charge it every 50 to 100 miles. The Tesla keeps the battery packs and such at a working temperature and this drains the batteries slowly. Unlike a gas vehicle. So this may make the car unacceptable in a few strange cases or to the luddites looking for reasons to avoid change.
By the way the judge declared Top Gear manufactured the lies but threw out Tesla's lawsuit because it was unclear how much financial damage resulted in the outright lies. I don't know about you but I don't start out a long trip without feeling up my gas tank, especially when the gas light is on, like the NY Times author did. I think Tesla should have blasted the NY Times harder because there are still some nutters out there that apparently don't get what happened.

Almost all BMWs are top speed limited to less than 150 mph. It's policy.

You are going to quibble over 5 mph, when the limiter can be defeated by anyone with money? We call that prevarication.

By the way the judge declared Top Gear manufactured the lies

Do you have a reference? I can't find this by Googling, which is why I ask.

It is nigh-impossible to find a reference because the google results are packed with copies of the same story reprinted by various news outlets with no reason to exist. It's too bad Google won't let you block an arbitrary number of websites from your search results permanently, because it is rapidly becoming useless for actually finding any targeted information on anything which has ever been major news. But the judge ruled that no one would take Top Gear seriously, that factoid shows up in multiple articles. That's because they're known to be full of shit. It's an entertainment program, not education.

Tesla Motors' efforts to clear allegations of reduced range on its electric cars just took another hit. A British appeals court dismissed a libel lawsuit filed by Tesla against the BBC's Top Gear show. The court rejected Tesla's appeal of a court decision last year that struck out its "libel and malicious falsehood" case against BBC. Tesla had asserted that the popular British automotive TV show had faked a scene that appeared to show a Tesla Roadster running out of power, which the Palo Alto, CA-based automaker said caused sales to drop.

Top Gear road tested two Roadsters in 2008 around a track - much more like racing conditions that typical day-to-day driving. Drivers tested the electric sports cars for acceleration, straight-line speed, cornering and handling. Top Gear claimed the car ran out of power after 55 miles - much lower than the automaker's estimated range of 200 miles. The TV show's review wouldn't have misled "a reasonable viewer" into thinking that the Roadster's range was less than the company's estimate under normal driving conditions, said Martin Moore-Bick, an appeals court judge in London, in his decision.

Tesla claimed it had lost $171,000 in lost sales as a result of the show's review of the car, and were well below the level of sales in the United States and European Union. Tesla's lawyers argued that the comments were defamatory because it had "intentionally or recklessly grossly misled potential purchasers." Judge Moore-Bick disagreed, saying the comments did not libel Tesla. Viewers would recognize that Top Gear's high-speed track testing was quite different than a normal driving style, he said.

Inaccurate media coverage can cost Tesla Motors much more than $171,000, according to CEO Elon Musk. He said that the "fake" report by New York Times writer John Broder on reduced range during his Model S road trip may have wiped out as much as $100 million in stock value for Tesla Motors. Musk asserts that the article resulted in several cancelled orders, probably costing Tesla "a few hundred" Model S purchases.

Mr Moore-Buck chucked out Tesla's libel lawsuit because "Viewers would recognize that Top Gear's high-speed track testing was quite different than a normal driving style, he said"

The problem with this is that it's a horrible piece of PR on the part of Tesla. Firstly Top Gear are petrol heads and very sceptical of electric cars and it was dumb to give them a car to review. Having done that it was

Almost all BMWs are top speed limited to less than 150 mph. It's policy.

Not really true. 130 mph limit for cars that come with all season tires from the factory, 155 mph limit for cars that come with summer performance tires from the factory. And from what I can tell the higher performance models come with the 155 limit only.

If warming the cabin to 72 is too much of a drain on the batteries, I'm quite interested in what the performance would be while running A/C.

protip: cooling is more energy-intensive than heating.

I've started trips with my fuel gauge on E -- it was broken, but I knew how much gas was in the tank. The NYT article stated that Tesla's people told the author that the charge would recover, that it was displaying an incorrect charge level due to the cold. They were, obviously, wrong.

I'n an internal combustion vehicle, heating is essentially free but in an EV every watt comes from the batteries, whether it is for heating or for cooling. I see no reason for heating to be less energy intensive than cooling.

I can. An electric heater can be nearly 100% efficient. An air conditioner isn't going to be anywhere near that.

You are quite right. It is more than 100 % efficient since it uses a heat pump. It takes less than 1kWh of energy from the battery to remove 1 kWh of heat from the car. Tesla uses a heat pump for heating too, so it's also more than 100 % efficient, by the way.

At worst, the efficiency of the heat pump as a heater will be 1. This happens when it's rather cold outside (a heat pump in a Tesla being used as a heater would need the outside air to warm the cooling side of the heat pump's loop, and as the temperature differential between the cool loop and the outside air decreases so does its efficiency until the outside air is as cool as the cool loop and your efficiency becomes 1, as the only energy moving

The input energy for the heat engine is less than the total amount of energy transported. In an example of a heat pump acting as a chiller, there is significant waste heat which must be dumped into a heat sink.Total energy transported is more than the input energy, but overall energy is conserved.

You need to read up on how heat pumps and air conditioners work. A plain heating element is 100% efficient in that all of the electrical energy used goes into generating heat. A heat pump is more efficient since most of the energy is used to pump heat from one location to another. A heat pump is basically an air conditioner run in reverse.

It was not necessary to read any further than this to discover that you are either too ignorant to read, or trolling. The car is a black box. Of course it has logging. And you can bet your bunghole that whatever they had to sign to get their hot, lying hands on the car included a clause about being tracked. You are either an idiot or a liar, or both.

This rocket (the Grasshopper RLV) is just a test article. It's a mass simulation of the first stage of a Falcon 9 [wikipedia.org], which has been launched to orbit successfully 5 times in a row. The idea is to test and prove the re-usability concept on the Grasshopper RLV before adapting it to the first stage of the Falcon 9. They've only done small hops so far, but the plan is to continue launching the Grasshopper RLV with more and more fuel until it can replicate the trajectory of the Falcon 9's first stage and safely return, at which point they'd be ready to begin adapting the Falcon 9 first stage for a safe return and landing.

Elon Musk is a visionary. He isn't looking to just do what others do, or limiting himself to what can be done next year, he's looking several years ahead. One of his goals is manned travel to Mars and return. That means being able to land a rocket in a non-destructive fashion and more efficiently than was done for Apollo. He's taking logical steps toward that goal.

I don't really see why you got a "redundant" mod, but I'm going to risk one by spelling some things out which you left unsaid. Elon's aiming for the long term, and probably counts a even permanent colony on Mars as only intermediate term. He has little interest in parachute return because eventually, he wants systems that can take off and return to planets such as Mars where chutes have little to work with. Mars also having lower gravity, it would be great if we already had a way to get there and could deve

Who are you working for?
Reasonable intelligent people generally give arguments against a person's ideas and action rather than the person themselves. You seem to just be desperate to discredit the person but don't have the mental bus fare to discredit (or even attempt) his work.

Sure, the idea of an electric car has been around for a while. So has the idea of a rocket, but dismissing every advancement since the Chinese launched glorified fireworks at the Mongols around 800 years ago is obviously idiotic, yet that seems to be exactly what you're doing with respect to the advancements in electric vehicle technology.

Um, ACTUAL, REAL electric cars have been 'around for a while', if you count over a hundred years as 'a while'.

They sucked so bad that our ancestors dumped them as soon as the internal combustion engine came along, and they still suck for the same reasons. They still need a 10x improvement in battery technology and a 50% reduction in cost to be competitive with ICE cars.

SpaceX are taking an established, profitable technology and making it better and cheaper. Tesla are taking a sucky technology that we abando

Just because you don't want one (Tesla) doesn't make it suck. Electric cars are interesting, potentially awesome. I'm glad someone is building them. At least its an American car that is better than most/all of its competition. Which is pretty rare. And the wide availability of recharge cuts the gasoline cord. Most people drive within its roundtrip range most of the time. There are inexpensive rental cars for long journeys. It makes sense if you want it to. If you don't want it to it never will.

That's news to me. Tesla can't make them fast enough for the demand. In their last quarterly report they said that if no new orders came in that there are enough on the books now for the rest of the year, and that's without any advertizing other than their show rooms.

As a new owner of a Tesla model S all I can say is that it is an amazing car. The problem has been that most of the EVs in the past had very limited range or were otherwise serious compromises. Many were converting a conventional ICE body to an electric drive train. Tesla built the car from the ground up around an EV drive train and were able to leverage the advantages of it. I have a 416HP motor with 495 ft-lbs of torque the size of a large water melon hidden underneath my large rear trunk, a large interior and another trunk in the front. The fact that the battery is entirely underneath the car makes for a very low center of gravity so the car handles beautifully.

Right now their problem is supply. They're running at near full-capacity making 450 cars per week. They can't make them fast enough. Once they sell enough cars to improve their finances they'll be able to invest in increasing their production.

Uranium offers about 1.7 million times the energy density of gasoline. Sometimes we trade off energy density for other qualities. In the case of electric cars, it's the elimination of emissions from the vehicle and the ability to use solar, wind and other clean sources of energy to refuel.

Oh you naysayer, you! Mister Musk has demonstrated that he now has a solution for when you need to lift something light up a few hundred feet by rocket. This will surely change our lives forever.That it has nothing whatsoever to do with landing a rocket that is in space is just you being negative. You're supposed to extrapolate that this is the first step towards that goal, even though tail landings aren't in anyone's plans, and has no place outside 1940-50s Sci Fi books.

Why bring down a rocket if it is in normal operation this way? Is it theoretically possible for a launch vehicle to make it all the way to orbit and back? Probably, but it's extremely inefficient! It's a circus trick, by the time the rocket is up in space, it has no fuel left, that's why multistage parts are jettisoned in the first place, the only valuable parts in them for the launch was the fuel and it gets burned up completely for the rocket to get to space.

Yes, by all means, you are in fact more knowledgeable than the experts!

I am not a rocket expert but this is not a question to rocket experts, this is an economics question. Taking up fuel instead of cargo and using fuel to bring back the launch vehicle safely as opposed to parachuting the launch vehicle (or its engines, the most complex part) and launching more useful cargo into orbit.

The question is about cost of production of a rocket and cost of fuel and cost of unit of cargo per launch, not about difficulty of a controlled descent. Assuming it's perfectly easy to do a co

Anyway, Skylon seems to be a far better launch vehicle for us here on Earth. Entirely reusable, and very efficient.

Except I can't see any business case for Skylon that makes any sense. You'd have to invest ten billion dollars or more to develop a flyable vehicle, and if it worked, it would launch cargo to orbit for about the same cost as SpaceX expect for a reusable Falcon which can be making money as an expendable or semi-reusable launcher while it's in development.

Any business plan which starts with 'first spend tens of billions before we bring in a cent of income' is pretty precarious.

$12bn for the entire project, and $970/kg versus $4,100 for the Falcon 9. The Skylon planes will be entirely reusable, and ready to fly again within days. The two are not comparable with regards to reusability or cost per kilogram. Not everything is developed a business first, remember.

$12bn for the entire project, and $970/kg versus $4,100 for the Falcon 9.

You presumably missed the part about a reusable Falcon. That Skylon number is higher than I've seen before, and if it can really only achieve a factor of four over a current expendable rocket, it's a lost cause. Particularly when that's a paper number vs a real cost and the real Skylon number would probably be higher.

Not everything is developed a business first, remember.

So you just need to find a philanthropist to give you $12,000,000,000 with no guarantee of success, and then cover the almost inevitable multi-billion dollar cost overruns before anything flies

As Henry Spencer said long ago, Skylon & every other hyperspace plane suffer from the problem where they accelerate slowly & are incapable of performing the last steps in attaining orbit without a rocket motor.

I am not a rocket expert but this is not a question to rocket experts, this is an economics question. Taking up fuel instead of cargo and using fuel to bring back the launch vehicle safely as opposed to parachuting the launch vehicle (or its engines, the most complex part) and launching more useful cargo into orbit.

The question is about cost of production of a rocket and cost of fuel and cost of unit of cargo per launch, not about difficulty of a controlled descent. Assuming it's perfectly easy to do a controlled descent (which is probably much more difficult to do from a much higher altitude than a few dozen meters above Earth, given that the rocket also needs to reorient itself and maneuver a much longer distance down to the surface) then the question is: how much cargo are you not taking up because you are taking up a huge amount of fuel to do this controlled descent, so it's not just a question of cost of fuel, it's a calculation of cost of launch of unit of cargo and cost of launch in total, etc.

One thing I don't have to be a rocket scientist to know is that if you do this, you are not being very efficient with your rocket, you are using huge amount of fuel just to haul fuel, you are not launching as much cargo as you can. You are launching and landing fuel. Then why not launch more cargo and a parachute to land some of the launch vehicle and instead work on manufacturing the rocket cheaper, more efficiently with a manufacturing conveyor line, with robots, with fewer people?

Why not use the money to improve efficiency of manufacturing of the rocket?

Musk wants to be in this business end to end, he wants to manufacture rockets and launch them and do everything. I don't need to be a rocket scientist to know for sure that he will not be as efficient at all of these as he can be at just some of it, that's why we have complex supply chains and specialisation.

Maybe he wants to be a total solution, but that would be Apple of space, not Linux of space so to speak. How about concentrating on the manufacturing side, creating the production process that is the most efficient and the cheapest and then mass producing launch vehicles for all who want to launch and operate them?

No, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to look at the overall business model.

If a reusable rocket costs 300 million and gets 10 launches thats 30 million per launch, if it costs 600 million thats 60 million over 10 launches, if it costs 1 billion, thats 100 million over 10 launches. A reuseable rocket can potentially save a lot of money even if it is vastly more expensive.

Considering he is figuring out how to make his current rockets reuseable this will make launches dirt cheap. As fuel is only 2.5 % o

Flying a rocket like this doesn't make much sense.... Here on earth, but as you can't parachute down to the lunar surface, or rely on chutes on Mars for hopping from place to place, then a reusable VTOL rocket becomes really handy.
But it does have to be test flown somewhere, and easier to test here than out there.

You really think people wouldn't be lining up to spend a week's vacation in space if they could buy it for the cost of a week-long cruise?

The big problem with spaceflight is that there's enough of a market at $10,000 a pound to keep several rocket companies in business, and there's a much bigger market below $100 a pound as mass tourism becomes viable. But there's no clear new market between those two, so an existing rocket company is likely to make less money as costs drop.

Not to mention, if spaceflight were much cheaper we would definitely launch more satellites. Currently you build an expensive satellite, because pretty much no matter how much you spend on it, it's still going to have a large part of it's expense dominated by the launch costs.

Get that price low enough though, and suddenly the whole "microsat" concept starts to make more sense and we can consider doing all sorts of interesting stuff (satellites which use point-to-point lasers for ground communications?)

The first stage weighs comparatively very little after it has been used because all the fuel is gone. So adding just a bit of extra fuel to land the now much lighter stage is not much of an expense, while being able to reuse that stage is a big deal. You seem unaware of this, but the cost of the fuel is not the main cost in sending things to space. The cost of the fuel per kg sent to space is about 16$-50$ [rsynnott.com]. It actually costs about 10,000$ to send a kg to space, so the costs of the fuel is not the main thing

You're just pulling numbers out of your arse. I suspect the amount of extra fuel needed to land the rocket is more in the region of 1-2%, but I don't know. What I do know is that Elon isn't an idiot (shame I can't say the same about you), and he will reuse the rocket the most cost efficient way possible. It is also likely that he has already had his engineers run the numbers on how feasible performing a powered landing is and how much fuel it will use.

A lot depends on whether you can land downrange or have to turn around and return to the launch site. The former takes very little fuel as you just have to survive aerobraking and land, the latter takes quite a bit more as you have to cancel all velocity, launch yourself back toward the place you came from, then land.

But still, the mass of the first stage does not have a huge impact on the payload. Adding a ton of structure or fuel might cut 100kg off your payload, and even if you have to add enough return

A lot depends on whether you can land downrange or have to turn around and return to the launch site. The former takes very little fuel as you just have to survive aerobraking and land, the latter takes quite a bit more as you have to cancel all velocity, launch yourself back toward the place you came from, then land.

You are forgetting that the first stage no longer has to decelerate the upper stages nor the filled mass of the first stage itself, just the residual weight of the first stage & whatever fuel+oxidants needed to land. Even if this & whatever weight added for landing gear adds 10% to the first stage's mass, SpaceX has shown that they have plans for performance improvements that should make Return to Launch Site feasible.

What is more important, to get the tube back down very slowly without damaging it (and burning up a huge amount of fuel while doing it and obviously making the entire flight much less efficient) or putting more cargo into orbit? I think he can achieve partial reusability by bringing down the rocket on parachutes (or at least the engines, which are probably the most intricate and expensive part) while using all the fuel in the rocket for its actual purpose - launch cargo.

Have you tried building a parachute to land 25 tons? NASA has for Ares I and it is very heavy and complex, more than a ton in itself. Alternatively you could do just the engines that are about 5-6 tons but then you'd need some kind of detachment system as well and you'll be throwing away a lot of expensive sensors and electronics not just a big tube. The bigger downside is that they're uncontrolled, you need to clear a big sea area, recover them then transport them back to base - not to mention they're drenched in salt water. If you just land there's not any added costs. The empty shell is only 7-8% of the launch weight and you're only slowing the decent so how do you need? Fuel is still only about $200k on a $50 million launch so even if you have to increase that by 10% you're probably shaving many millions off each launch. I think they know what they're doing.